Last week saw GumGum Sports reveal details from its NHL Scoreboard — a new, near real-time artificial intelligence/computer-vision platform used by teams, leagues and brands to measure the ROI of its deals, tracking 506 sponsors across 10 in-arena/on-ice NHL sponsorship placements. Among the findings:
Instagram was by far the best social media platform in generating media value, with $5.75M in total sponsor value. Twitter only drove $597K in total value, with Facebook at $494K.
The top sponsor: GEICO ($321K in sponsor media value; GEICO is a partner with 21 teams). But Party City — with just one (!!) team sponsorship, the Rangers — had the fourth-highest sponsor media value total ($145K), besting NHL TV and Toyota, who had 12 team partnerships/branding in 12 arenas (including the Rangers and Flyers, so similar big markets).
The Chicago Blackhawks, who have more social media followers than any other team (6.7M) actually came in third among all teams in providing social media media value for their sponsors, with the Toronto Maple Leafs (fourth-most social media followers among all teams; 4.04M) topping the results.
The top in-arena/on-ice sponsor placement, with more than 12 times the sponsor media value than the next-best position: static dashboard ($5.77M). The static dashboard made up 84 percent of the total GumGum Sports NHL Scoreboard value.
The NHL introduced a new area of the ice for sponsors to put their logos at this season, for the first time allowing for an in-ice corner logo. The area ranks sixth in location rank, giving teams $98.3K in total value to date, besting such in-arena logo placement stalwarts as in-ice naming rights, arena LED ring, LED dashboard and the penalty box.
Cynopsis asked Brian Kim, GumGum Sports general manager, about the system and its results, discussing the lessons learned and what brands can learn from the data.
Kim on social media: Social media has created completely new channel for teams to generate value back to their fans and their sponsors. GumGum Sports felt it was important to be able to show the league, teams and brands how this channel is being effectively used, what is working and what is not working. The great thing about social media is that all the content can be generated from the team, so it really is a new revenue stream that can be maximized if a team does it well. For hockey, where there is a good amount of standardization in the types of sponsorships that are run in a game, it’s a great way to be able to benchmark against competitors, see who is doing well and who is not, and figure out ways to improve in generating value back to their sponsorships.”
On lessons learned: We’ve learned kind of expectedly that the Static Dasherboard is by far the highest generating value placement on social media thus far for most teams. In total, it generates 84 percent of the total value created from team accounts, mainly because teams only share highlight clips of their games. It was also interesting to learn that more sponsors didn’t necessarily translate to more value. A lot of sponsors in the NHL will sponsor 10-to-15 teams, but we saw Party City, Air Canada, Scotiabank and Kia in our top 10 sponsors in value even though they sponsored less than 8 teams each.”
On benefitting brands: For brands, both existing NHL sponsors and potential brands thinking of sponsoring, we believe our data is key in their decision making process. It really allows them to see which teams are being successful in representing their sponsorships and who might not be. A lot of times, sponsors may think that value is a popularity contest based on how many followers a team has, but what our data has shown is really that the rankings in value don’t match up to popularity alone and that there are ways for teams to control content distribution and create new revenue opportunities. On the team side, we believe our data really shows them some of the gaps that they have in how they produce content right now. The static dasherboard is so skewed in value compared to the other placements in an arena and that is an opportunity that teams can seize to figure out how to generate authentic rich content to promote those other placements and generate more value for them.”
On surprises: I think we were most surprised with how underutilized social media still appears to be for NHL teams. Compared to some other sports, we don’t see as much of a concentrated effort on generating sponsorship value and really the focus is primarily on highlight clips from each game. Those two things can go hand-in-hand but it was a bit surprising to not see the business side take more advantage.”
